Ideas….

In March I’ll be presenting at NERCOMP. The theme for this year’s conference is: “The Next-Generation University: Rethinking IT in Disruptive Times”. My presentation will be on Cloud Computing in Higher Education (I know you’re shocked right?).

As a companion to this presentation. I’m doing a survey, to see what kind of things institutions are using in the cloud. Its definitely not a comprehensive list of what’s in the cloud or even what’s possible in the cloud, but my presentation is only 40 minutes.

At any rate, if you work in academia and you’re interested in/using cloud computing, please please please take my survey.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/cloud-academia

Your help will be greatly appreciated.

I decided that I wanted to create an EBS backed AMI on Amazon’s Cloud Computing platform.  I thought this would be REALLY hard.  I was completely wrong.

The first thing I did was start with an already existing EBS AMI. Right now there aren’t too many available but they are growing.  I chose an Ubuntu 9.04 image since I’m going to install a stack on it, and I’ve already done *most* of it before on Ubuntu.

A quick note: it is possible to create an EBS AMI from an S3 AMI, but I wasn’t able to figure that out (quickly).  Although I did find a script that will do this for you: http://gist.github.com/249915.

Next, I wanted to get the Ubuntu server prepared.  I needed to:

• install mysql — http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/ubuntu/install-mysql-server-5-on-ubuntu/
• install ruby on rails — http://www.hackido.com/2009/04/install-ruby-rails-on-ubuntu-904-jaunty.html (up to and including step 6)
• install zlib — http://www.techsww.com/tutorials/libraries/zlib/installation/installing_zlib_on_ubuntu_linux.php
• install blacklight — http://projectblacklight.org (includes solr and a number of gem dependencies)

I did all of this.  One thing I noticed, Blacklight requires me to use non-standard ports (ie not 22 and 80).  While the server was running, I went into the AWS console and opened ports for its associated security group.  The changes took effect immediately.  I definitely liked that.

Finally, I went in to the AWS Management Console and chose “Create Image (EBS AMI)”.

Then I filled in the information including a description of my image:

and voila! EBS backed AMI.  the one caveat is:

DON’T TERMINATE THE INSTANCE UNTIL THE NEW AMI HAS FINISHED BEING CREATED

because then you’ll loose all the work that you have just done.  doh!

I’m beginning to flesh out my ideas for the NERCOMP presentation proposal I’m considering.  To do that I needed to think about what it is that I would want to cover.  I always feel its important to start off with a definition so that everyone is on the same page as to what it is that is being discussed. Below is a presentation I created with a brief definition of cloud computing.

To be fair, the definition of cloud computing is in flux and not always agreed upon. In the second slide, I borrowed from NIST’s working definition of cloud computing. This is the generally agreed upon definition (although some of the “finer” points are still up for debate…for a better, more entertaining discussion of this see Simon Wardley’s OSCON Presentation on YouTube)

I would love to hear any feedback you might have on this brief definition/presentation. Any comments you have will help me give a better presenation in the long run.